Monica Drake has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to The Oregonian, The Stranger, and the Portland Mercury and her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop.
"Welcome to the book of my arch enemy. "Rival" would be a nicer
word, but let's be honest. In 1991, in Tom Spanbauer's kitchen,
where our whole workshop of beginning writers still fit around his
dinky kitchen table, every week Monica Drake was the star. The
stories she read to us ... about sitting all night locked inside
the Portland Art Museum, alone to guard the ancient mummy of a
Chinese empress, staring at a dish filled with the preserved
contents of the mummy's stomach - mostly ancient pumpkin seeds. As
Monica talked about being locked behind steel gates and barred
doors and bulletproof Plexiglas, the rest of Tom's students, we'd
forget to breathe.
Writing this introduction, I'm not doing an old friend a favor -
I'm paying a decade-old debt. This isn't charity or flattery - this
is honesty.
Writers are nothing if not rivals, but competition as good as
Monica Drake is a blessing. Clown Girl is more than a great book.
Clown Girl is its own reality. We should all have an arch enemy
this brilliant.
" --CHUCK PALAHNIUK, Author of Fight Club (from the introduction)
""Writers are nothing if not rivals," writes Chuck Palahniuk in his
introduction to this funny novel, "but competition as good as
Monica Drake is a blessing. Clown Girl is more than a great book.
Clown Girl is its own reality." True, but Baloneytown isn't a place
you'd want to live in, what with the desperation, the poverty, the
hate crimes against clowns involving "meringue pies full of scrap
iron."" --THE LOS ANGELES TIMES "Riffing on language and revising
her jokes in nervous flurries, Nita is the most endearingly teary
clown since Smokey Robinson." --ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY "Welcome to
wacky, stressful Baloneytown, where clown prostitution, stoned dogs
and fire juggling-cum-arson are the norm. [T]he pace of the
narrative is methamphetamine-frantic, as Drake drills down past the
face paint and into Nita's core, often using Nita's relations with
men as the bit. Nita emerges as a fully-realized character, bearing
witness to a lot of the emotionally ridiculous and just a hint of
the sublime. [T]here is a lot more going on here than just clowning
around." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Clown Girl by Monica Drake. She's an
amazing writer and, she's created this incredible world." --KRISTEN
WIIG, THE DAILY BEAST "Clown Girl is a devishly quirky look at a
downtrodden young clown adrift in the hostile streets of
Baloneytown. It is a worthy fictional successor to another Rose
City female writer's highly original novel with not-dissimilar
material - Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, an instant idiosyncratic
classic about freaks in a traveling carnival that was a finalist
for the National Book Award in 1989." --THE SEATTLE
POST-INTELLIGENCER "Sniffles, the titular Clown Girl, is
endearingly self-deprecating, an oddball comic who masks her
insecurity with a show of bravado and, more literally, a crazy
array of clown garb. Clown Girl is a polished, quirky and
often-funny look at the dark side of clown life." --WINNIPEG FREE
PRESS "Can a farce involving strap-on "pendulous breasts," a rubber
chicken called Plucky, biblical balloon tricks, a marijuana-eating
puppy, clown fetishists and the phrase "EKG=Nazis" also succeed as
a work of psychological realism? Monica Drake's debut novel Clown
Girl leads me to believe the answer is yes. Clown Girl's pages give
off the perfume of sun-baked concrete, cinnamon, turpentine,
spilled beer, bruised fruit, piss and clown grease. It's a sharp
and engaging debut - which I suppose is a fancy way of saying I
want to read it again." --PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY "Drake's humor will
strike some as dark, but it would be more accurately described as
shades of gray shot through with hot pink. Her Nita is hilarious
and poignant, fantastical and real." --THE OREGONIAN "Drake is
raising expectations with Clown Girl, a tight, claustrophobic
little tale with a charming cast of self-obsessed screwups."
--WILLAMETTE WEEK "While clowns are visual creations who rely on
their physical presence to ensnare (or terrify) their audience,
Drake very deftly translates that physicality to prose - I had the
urge to put the book down and applaud." --THE STRANGER "Clown Girl
is sideways humor: social commentary disguised as pratfalls. It's
surely one of the most polished and eccentric pieces of fiction to
come along in recent memory, the result of several years' work by
this talented Portland writer. Drake's humor won't compute for
every reader. Just the smart ones who dig gray and hot-pink neon."
--THE SEATTLE TIMES "Drake's imagination is boundless, her
compassion intense. No matter how absurd a situation this
antiheroine gets herself into, it's impossible not to will her to
get back out. The strange world that Drake creates in Clown Girl is
peculiarity entrancing and wholly, vividly imagined: You can
substitute any put-upon, impoverished, outside-the-mainstream or
even simply imperfect sort of individual or group for her clowns,
or you can read Clown Girl as a gorgeous mix of character study and
unlikely manifesto about the artist's place in the world." --EUGENE
WEEKLY "Monica Drake's Clown Girl is a high-voltage creation. She's
a passionate martyr to the art of clowning in a slapstick world
that despises and exploits clowns. She's hit a rough patch where
the pratfalls hurt and the locals don't get her jokes. She's
Groucho one hour, Chaplin the next, and a hospitalized Stooge or
three by sunrise. She's sad as Emmett Kelly, indignant as Holden
Caulfield. Maybe she's wrong. She's certainly cranky. But Clown
Girl is mesmerizing, drunk on the high wire, gorgeous and dangerous
fun." --KATHERINE DUNN, Author of Geek Love "Clown Girl is an
extreme novel - beyond metaphor, a hilarious book that asks the
startling question: what does it mean to be serious about clowning?
This intelligent narrative always keeps in mind the bleakness and
desperation that initially caused a need for clowns, and that they,
in their way, embody. Is there exaggeration in the book's narrator,
or in its world, or neither, or both? I found myself asking if I
were myself a clownâŻand if not, why not? Caulrophiles and
caulrophobes, prepare yourselves!" --PETER ROCK, Author of The
Unsettling "Monica Drake's Clown Girl is a bright shining bubble of
a novel, dark, funny and deeply strange. The writing is brilliant -
I would read this novel for the sentences alone - but it is
Sniffles herself and her struggles to come to grips with life in
Baloneytown that stay with me. The word "unique" is widely abused
but I think, for once, it's justified: this novel is not much like
anything else, and all the better for it. A really exciting debut."
--KEVIN CANTY, Author of Winslow in Love
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